Research and Reports

The huge Los Angeles Unified School District would be more
segregated and not necessarily more efficiently managed if it were
reorganized into several smaller districts, according to a study
prepared for the California state legislature.

The many problems of the district--which encompasses 25
municipalities and 710 square miles and which enrolls about 543,000
students--are not directly attributable to its size and management
structure, according to the study by the Evaluation and Training
Institute, a Los Angeles research firm. The study was commissioned
after legislators expressed concern over the "unmanageability" of the
district.

Several options--including the transfer of sections of the Los
Angeles Unified district to contiguous districts and the creation of
more subdistricts--were explored by the consultants and found to have
more drawbacks than the current administrative structure.

One of the district's major problems, the report notes, is not
inefficiency, but inequity. Schools in predominantly white areas of the
district are underused and spend more money per pupil than the
districtwide average, while schools in many black and Hispanic
neighborhoods are overcrowded and in poor condition.

These conditions would most likely be exacerbated by breaking up the
district, the nation's second largest, according to the report.

The district has, the report notes, been "scrupulously fair" when
assigning teachers, so that class sizes are not appreciably different
from one school to the next. The report does recommend that the
legislature take certain steps to improve efficiency. Among them:

Provide incentives for closing underused schools or penalties for
not doing so.

Provide enough construction money to relieve overcrowding.

Amend laws governing school employees so that performance may be
given greater weight when deciding which employees to keep on the
staff.

Modify state laws so that parents can continue to work as aides in
their children's schools without having to pass minimum-competency
tests for which they are ill-prepared. Foreign-speaking parents often
"act as liaisons" for students who do not speak English and "greatly
facilitate the educational process."

Allow children to enroll in a school near their parents' jobs
instead of the school closest to the home, if the family so
chooses.

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